Wet food giving cat diarrhea!!

Wet food seems to be giving one of my cats bad diarrhea. I decided to play around with his food to see what the culprit was, so I decided to take him completely off wet food for a couple days. He only ate dry food, which is Blue Buffalo Wilderness, and his stool firmed up and was fine. I then reintroduced his wet food, which is grain free natural balance, and the diarrhea returned! I immediately stopped feeding him the wet food and looked for alternative brands. I decided to go ahead and give Wellness a try. Well, the diarrhea is back. I have no idea what to do now.. of course there is the vet, but I would like to try and fix this issue without having to go there, but I will if I have to. Other than diarrhea, he seems perfectly fine. He's eating and playing with his sister.

He did have Giardia about a month or so ago.. but he was tested negative after treatment. I haven't completely ruled it out..but it really seems like the wet food is the cause here. Does anyone have suggestions or food brands that I could try before I take him over to the vet?? Much appreciated!

Background: Cat is ~7 months old. I adopted him and his sister about 2 months ago. He had tested positive for Giardia when I first got them, and were on treatment. When he was tested again, his fecal exam came back negative.

Giardia is a tricky one, because to find it in the fecal sample, the cysts have to be shed. As long as he's on the dry food and producing normal stool, I would consider taking a sample in to the vet for another look for giardia, just to be sure.

That said, there seems to be a relationship to the food, so it's probably not giardia. The diarrhea means the food is moving through his system too quickly, and he's not properly absorbing (at least) the moisture.

While it's possible it's an ingredient issue, I think the issue is to figure out an appropriate way to slow things down. Some people do this by feeding a food with grain. It's healthier for him in the long run if you avoid this.

To help eliminate (if possible) the potential ingredient problem, can you let us know more specifically which Blue Buffalo Wilderness dry food recipe you've been feeding?

There are quite a few: http://bluebuffalo.com/cat-food/grain-free-wilderness


And which Natural Balance and Wellness recipes/flavors did you feed him?

We might be able to identify an alternative wet food. *Might*

In the meantime, as there are benefits to using probiotics anyway (http://www.thecatsite.com/a/should-i-give-my-cat-probiotics), I would consider giving him a rather large dose (minimum 10 billion CFU daily) of an L. acidophilus product. You might want to find one combined with digestive enzymes and FOS (a substrate promoting growth of healthy bacteria).

Oh - someone that had a kitty with a similar problem used Eagle Holistic Solutions. Turns out, they have one formulated specifically for transitions!

It might be worth giving it a try:

When Tumbles was about 7-8 mos old, he developed loose stools.  He was eating Wellness and Taste of the Wild, all grain free.  After 3 rounds of metronidazole, the vet suggested Royal Canin Gastrointestinal HE.  That firmed things up very nicely.  We continued the grain free wet food, but put him on RC dry.  We figured out that his system cannot tolerate a totally grain-free diet.  Over the past 3 years, we've tweaked the amount of RC to include grain free dry.  We still can't go totally grain free, but he does get some grain free dry along with the RC.  It works for him and for us.